SILLY HUMOR FOR SMART PEOPLE

It is the author’s stupid opinion that stupidity is very undervalued nowadays. To vindicate this quality, he has written the ten books gathered in these two compilations:

SILLY HUMOR FOR SMART PEOPLE

It includes five books. The protagonist of the first is the Victorian ghost in all its variety: visible ghosts, invisible ghosts, dancing ghosts, crazy ghosts, singing ghosts, giggling ghosts, ghostly ghosts… The second addresses the mysteries of the paranormal, mainly by the hand of the Society for Psychical Research in its infancy at the end of the 19th century (inevitably, also here you’ll find some ghosts). The third plunges us into the Romantic era: writers of the stature of Lord Byron, Goethe, Bettina Brentano, Hölderlin, Novalis, et cetera, face all kinds of weird phenomena such as ghosts (yes, I’m afraid that there are ghosts around again), palmistry, aliens, love… and philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. The fourth insists on the subject of the paranormal, this time located in New York City in the mid-1930s (more ghosts here). And finally the fifth delves into the secrets of Kabbalah by the hand of the famous Wise Men of Chelm (no ghosts here, but a golem and a dybbuk). All five books well seasoned with large doses of what anthropologists call ‘idiotic thinking’.

SILLY HUMOR FOR SMART PEOPLE (Ghostless Edition)

It includes five other books. The protagonist of the first one is the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, in his awkward beginnings in the late 19th century Vienna. (It also includes a representative sample of psychoanalytic practice.) In the second, the most intelligent detective of all time is passed through the sieve of the most absurd humor. (“If Sherlock Holmes had been Groucho Marx”, it could have been titled.) In the third, Franz Kafka, the celebrated author of “The Trial”, supplants the protagonist of his novel when he is put on trial in a crazy court for a crime he has not committed. (The book includes an humorous treatise about the figure of the writer and the city of Prague, to which he is inextricably linked.) The fourth portrays the atmosphere that filled Paris during the “Belle Époque”, taking as a reference Marcel Proust’s monumental novel “In Search of Lost Time”. And the fifth and last one has as its main character a Superantihero who faces the gangsters and the political corruption in the New York of the mid-19th century. All five books well seasoned with large doses of what anthropologists call ‘idiotic thinking’.